Anchor Point

by Alice Robinson

  They embraced. Laura felt herself frown, repeating, ‘Later than you said?’

  But Vik was pulling away and hurrying into the house. Laura followed her inside, quashing confusion, her misgivings, setting the kettle to boil.

  Vik sat where Katja had sat weeks before.

  Laura said, ‘How was it?’

  ‘I need a few minutes first, you know, without thinking about it.’ Vik dabbed at her pristine face, blotting sweat. ‘As if that’s possible!’

  Laura knew what she meant. She recalled with fresh shock that there were no more secrets between them. All those years, Laura had feared Vik’s anger – and Vik had been angry, rightly so. Listening to Vik’s questions, her voice so full of longing to understand why Laura acted as she had, Laura saw that her sister was stronger, more capable, than she had ever allowed herself to believe. How much she liked the woman Vik had become.

  Vik shook her head. ‘I just don’t know what to think about her.’

  Laura sat back, trying to get used to the fact all over again. Vik knew. She wanted to say something then, to give comfort or receive it. Vik was already pushing back her chair.

  By unspoken agreement, they went outside. It felt right to Laura – the right place to say what needed to be said. They set out slowly across the paddocks, fording uphill through the heat. It had also seemed right to meet in person, after everything, to talk. But for now they were silent, working legs and lungs. Laura let Vik lead the way.

  ‘God,’ Vik said, staring down, mouth open in disbelief. ‘She’s awful!’

  Laura instantly felt a weight lift away that she hadn’t known she carried, and before she knew it they were sobbing and laughing, hanging on to each other. Vik lowered herself down and Laura gratefully leaned into her sister. Before them yawned the crevasse, the place that had seemed to swallow their mother all those years ago. Laura took Vik’s damp palm. Suddenly, she didn’t care what issues needed covering. What aspects of Katja’s return needed to be aired. Everything important to her was as it should be: there in that moment, with Vik’s delicate fingers pressed into her hand. Despite the earth crumbling down into the gully as she watched; the baking sun; their old man’s clothes, still hanging patiently in the bedroom wardrobe, not yet packed away; despite the unresolved issue of Katja’s request, her longing to be part of their lives, for a price, Laura felt that she had never been more content, perhaps never would be again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, unsure what else she could say, but Vik took her arm fiercely.

  ‘Listen, you didn’t make her do it. It wasn’t your fault.’ It was the first time Vik had said such a thing.

  As they walked, Vik described the time Katja had spent with her in Melbourne, filling in details she had neglected on the phone. ‘A week was enough. For now.’ She explained how impressed Katja had been by their success, the apartment, and simultaneously suspicious. ‘Kept commenting on everything, how much it all cost,’ Vik said. ‘Telling me about all these “natural” products’ – her fingers sliced the air, angry little quotation marks – ‘stuff I should buy to supposedly keep us healthy. I mean, really!’ Fuelled by anger, she was almost running down the hill. ‘You should have heard her giving her critique of the pieces in Michael’s shop.’

  ‘She go on about the crystals? All that?’

  Vik snorted, tossing her head. When she spoke, Laura was reminded of all the moments she had spent spread across her sister’s bed, killing herself laughing. How eerie it was to hear Katja’s voice emerging from Vik’s mouth, ‘You should wear purple to guard against all these negative vibrations, Viktoria …’

  There were mornings in the month after Vik’s visit when Laura woke up so completely exhausted that she didn’t know where in time she was. The little notebooks had been more than the chronic adherence to organisation that Vik liked to tease her for; they were her attempt to hold things down, make them stick. In her deep self, whatever part of her it was that made her animate and unique, she felt herself going the way of Bruce. In a way, she had felt it creeping up for years. It was slight now, just a dropped stitch. But it would rip eventually.

  Even so, she couldn’t quite believe it, despite the strange sense of slippage inside her head. She wasn’t fifty yet – had just seen her father die a long, slow, fractured death. Sliding down inside himself, a man trapped in a glass jar against the sides of which he uselessly scrabbled.

  Some mornings, when Laura woke, she believed she was a teenager again. Sometimes she was a child. She craned to hear Bruce moving about in the kitchen, to hear Vik’s breath across the room from her bed. Sometimes she groped over the sheet for Luc’s reassuring form, catching fistfuls of air. It was not always frightening. There was the sense of being caught in the static between radio stations. If she waited long enough, her mind would tune in.

  But once she became aware of herself, of the now, it was hard to get up. The present was the worst of all possible times. How old she felt. How lonely. Not even a view to cheer and bring comfort; the valley a bowl of sand. Each early morning as Laura worked things out fresh, feeling the difficulties of her real life, the sun seemed to rise over the valley like it had never set. It gradually grew light, but the heat from the day before, the day before, the day before, sat trapped below the renewed rays, deeply embedded in dry earth.

  One afternoon, the voice of a man rang out on the front porch. Laura drew her hands from tepid dishwater, dried them on a frayed tea towel, and wondered how long she had been washing her single mug and bowl. This would have been unthinkable during daylight hours before, back when Bruce was around. But the work had dried up. There was so little left alive; there were few outdoor tasks remaining.

  Vik offered to come back again to help, but Laura put her off. What could Vik do? When the last of the new chooks died, Laura had left the pen empty. The conditions were all wrong for birds; they had stopped laying and she couldn’t feed animals that didn’t pay. The veggie garden was a fenced square of dirt.

  ‘Hello? Anyone home?’ Knuckles rapped on wood.

  Laura smoothed the front of her shirt, which had belonged to Bruce and had worn soft as moth wing over the years. She felt the heat of the day coming through the front door, touching the wood with her hand, the way she had been trained, to test in case of fire.

  Opening the front door, she leaned out, as if into an oven. The land beyond the house came slowly into focus, a flattened panorama of horizontal shapes, brown rectangle on brown rectangle on white rectangle: the sky. A man stood with one foot on the bottom step. He grinned, teeth rounded like white seashells.

  ‘Yes?’ Laura said, squinting.

  ‘It’s me, Joseph,’ he said. Then, shyly, ‘Ya muppet.’

  ‘Joseph?’

  ‘Been a while,’ he said.

  Inside, Laura said, ‘Tea?’

  There was something about the way Joseph stood silently, his hat going over and over his knuckles like a wheel. It made Laura think that for all his fancy clothes and cars, he hadn’t really changed. How like his father he was. There was something measured and poised about his gaze, as though he could see beyond her skin; she wasn’t fooling him.

  Joseph took the mug she offered. Laura noticed, shamefully, the round circle pressed in dust on the table where it had been.

  She said, ‘You living in town?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He caught her checking his left hand. ‘Just me,’ he said, and winked.

  They drank in familiar silence, and Laura felt her head clear.

  ‘Got a favour to ask,’ Joseph said.

  Those warm brown eyes: how many times had she looked into them and laughed? But where the boy had been – her closest friend, her brother – there was this man. For the hundredth time, she wondered why she had let their separation go on so long, but she was also glad, since the surprise of him gave such pleasure. Sitting there, sweating, drinking lukewarm Bushells, Laura felt a tiny wash of hope. Here was Joseph.

  She half-listened as he explained that he had come
back to Kyree for his old dad, who had always missed the place. She couldn’t stop staring at the shape of his hands, so much larger than she remembered: his wrists, once bony, grown thick. Joseph was saying that he’d bought the Jolley place a year back, when property was still cheap. The entire valley formed their ancestral place, he reminded her. She watched his lips form words. He had never tried to kiss her. Not once in all those years. A wave of sorrow bore her up. She felt dried up. Her lips had been worth kissing, once.

  Joseph explained that the whole district had been theirs, back when. He sounded careful to keep accusation from his tone. His neutrality was well-honed, slick. He’d been lucky to buy in when he did. What with the subdivision, things were on the rise.

  Laura brought herself ’round to his words. ‘What are you saying, Joe?’

  ‘Give us a minute to explain,’ he said, putting up a hand as though to ease her down manually. ‘Laura.’

  She flinched: her real name, made with his mouth.

  Joseph took a deep breath. ‘We just want to know if you’re ’right with us lot coming through here from time to time,’ he said. ‘Would mean a lot to my old man, to be able to come onto the place. ’Specially now, what with Peterson’s gone and done.’

  Laura gave Joseph a long, hard stare. She eased back down into her chair.

  They spoke for an hour. He told her that his family knew the watercourse, the creek where the dry gully was now. He paused, thinking, then said they knew it well, and always.

  Turning the words over and over, Laura couldn’t stop the jab of jealousy. Now they wanted access to the whole creek, not just the part that ran between fences on their block.

  ‘What’s that you’re always on about?’ Laura said. ‘Mining and that? Jesus, Joe.’

  ‘I can explain. If that’s what you really want to talk about.’

  She measured him with her eyes for a moment, then looked away. What did it matter what his politics were? The land belonged to her and Vik. She thought how mixed up they all were. There was what they believed and what they did, the stories they told. So many truths contained in skin, concentric rings. Laura imagined herself a log, sawn open. How many layers?

  She remembered the way Joseph had stood on the farmhouse roof fighting the bushfire. Streaks of soot like dried blood on his face. They couldn’t have saved the place without his help. How much she owed him. In another life, other choices, it might all have been his – this patch of dirt. Laura allowed herself a fraction of a second to imagine it, the two of them growing old together. She recalled the look on Luc’s face when he first noticed the big tree out the back.

  ‘’Course,’ Laura said, and the smoke from that long-ago fire seemed to sharpen in her lungs. ‘You can use the place any time you like.’

  Joseph’s shoulders dropped. Laura watched them fall. In fact, everything about his body appeared to soften, relax. A familiar looseness came into his limbs, the set of his jaw. Laura glowed with the thought that she had done it.

  Joseph explained how much it meant, the access she had granted. Said he had known she wouldn’t give a toss if he came ’round, but it meant something that the others could come too. They wouldn’t come over often, he added.

  ‘Land’s pretty stuffed,’ Laura said. ‘Been livestock over the road for, I dunno, fifty, a hundred years at least before Peterson’s subdivision.’

  Joseph winced and said, ‘I’ve seen it.’

  ‘Remember when it was all bush on this side, too?’ Laura leaned forward. There was something she wanted him to understand, something she had never been able to articulate before. Her voice came fast and rasping. ‘My old man, he bought this land, worked it. I’ve tried to, you know, repair some of the damage.’

  They turned together to look out of the kitchen window. Hills of grit. Laura found she suddenly had nothing more to say. The words had fallen away, quick as that. She sat back, despair washing over her. She said, ‘It’s in me, somehow. This place.’

  They sat together for a moment in silence before Joseph made his leave. There were articles to write, clients to see, meetings to run. Laura’s head spun with the purposefulness of his life, dizzying, just barely glimpsed through the list of appointments he reeled off. How little she knew of him now. She was borne along by his genuine happiness, the rush of parting goodbyes. Swept up. If only they had kept in touch, Laura thought, things might now be different. But what might have been seemed long gone, with the rain.

  Joseph leaned out the car window, engine running, elbow on sill. ‘Keep in touch, douchebag,’ he said softly. ‘Missed you.’

  Though she smiled, Laura felt stricken. More than anything she longed for time to wind back, just to stave off his departure. He was already waving, pulling away.

  ‘Wait!’ she called, thinking of Katja. ‘Forgot to tell you!’

  But he was too far away to hear her, windows wound up and dust settling in his wake. It wasn’t until she could no longer hear the car that she felt just how quiet the farm was. She was alone. She strained to catch the sound of birdcall and rustling leaves.

  Laura phoned to give Vik the details of her trip to Melbourne. She lied and said the ute was in the shop, that she liked catching the train. In fact, she was just too nervous now to drive such long distances. Her doctor insisted that it would be a while before the symptoms of the disease would be fully felt, but she knew her own mind. Familiar journeys sometimes went blank – the route from shed to house made mysterious, as if she were a stranger to the place. If she took a wrong turn, walked for an hour away from the house, she would never be far from a good clear view of the valley, which could guide her home.

  ‘You’ll pick me up?’ Laura said. She tried not to sound too eager. She wanted to tell Vik in person about her condition. A drought project, for when all other jobs had withered. Vik wouldn’t understand why she wanted to sell the farm all of a sudden, not without the full, tragic story – the cloud-cover amassing in her mind. She had to let the farm go, couldn’t save it any more than she could save herself. If she didn’t get out now, it would finish her.

  Vik came to the station. It took a moment for her face to emerge from the jostling crowd. Laura thought she felt the first fronds of panic, but it was Vik’s hand on her arm. She almost cried with relief. Her sister was well into a story, words rushing, as if they had been talking for some time. Laura tried to find a second of stillness to draw in the familiar face. They embraced. Vik looked cool and put-together in her white linen suit. She did not stop talking. Laura, boots tanned with copper dust, felt smeared.

  Vik ushered her through underground terraces to the car. Laura carried her own bags. The apartment was only streets away. Still, as Vik said, the car was air-conditioned, and it was far too hot to walk. They strode through the blistering wind with their heads down. Laura held on to Vik, eyes partially closed against the grit and glare.

  The streets were almost deserted, footpaths glittering, sticky in heat. The city looked turned to glass. Laura didn’t remember it being so big and bright and high. It had been years since she’d come down to Melbourne; that was progress for you. The sunlight was made piercing by the millions of mirrors against which it bounced.

  ‘That was probably the last train, Lor. You were lucky. It’s all over the news,’ Vik was saying. ‘The fires. And they’re getting closer.’

  They shared a quick look. Bushfire was ripping through Victoria. Laura knew that Vik was remembering, as she was, the heat on her face from the flames they’d once fought.

  On the outskirts of the city the front was already kilometres long, fed to atomic proportions by the extreme heat, the dry land. A brutal wind was blowing, as if the fire was drawing breath. The whole state was on high alert. Laura, surprising even herself, wasn’t worried about the farm. The new estates on Peterson’s place would be well protected by the CFA. And if the fire did sweep through, well. She had nothing left to lose.

  Vik’s apartment was cool and quiet, as though belonging to a wholly separate atmo
sphere. Vik showed Laura how to control the temperature in the guest room, a pattern of buttons and processes. Laura smiled, nodded, said she understood. The room was neat and bright, like Vik.

  ‘Thank you,’ Laura said, dropping her case, turning abruptly to face Vik.

  She took her sister in her arms, that familiar shape. In fact, it was Vik – statuesque, gym-strong – who held her. Laura lay a cheek on Vik’s shoulder, sucking back tears. The relief, a flood. Finally handing herself over to her sister’s care.

  ‘What’s this then?’ Vik said, bemused, covering her alarm. After a moment, her arms winched tight around Laura’s waist.

  Laura told her. It came out just like that. ‘Viko,’ she said. ‘I’m sick.’

  Golden flame flickered distant on the horizon. Laura sat on the couch nursing a cup of tea, feeling as though she had front-row seats to the end of the world. The view from the thirty-third floor was phenomenal.

  It was almost possible to forget that the fire was real, to see it as the impressive light show it appeared to be from their vantage point, well out of harm’s way. From the tower, it looked like the whole world was burning. The line of fire stretched from left to right as far as the eye could see. It was only centimetres high to Vik and Laura, but advancing.

  They had been talking quietly for some time. When Vik recovered well enough, she went straight into manager mode, as Laura knew she would, wanting to map the whole thing out. She fired questions, steely-eyed. Laura listed her symptoms, unfolding the report she had received from the doctor, the two deft words of her sentence: early onset.

  She knew her struggle to express the rest was information enough for Vik. In any case, they were both familiar with the disease. Vik used the word haunted. Laura joked that she couldn’t believe how much like Bruce she was: to get sick like him, on top of the rest!

  ‘What about you?’ Laura said tentatively. ‘You been tested for the Alzheimer’s gene? Do you have it?’

  Vik inclined her head a fraction, eyes downcast. Laura caught the meaning. Relief surged like adrenalin. She scooped Vik’s hand, squeezing. ‘Thank God!’ she cried. ‘But that’s great, Viko! So then Cait’s also …’ But she couldn’t think of the word.